American strategy in Afghanistan flunks Sun Tzu

Proof of counterinsurgency’s failures is the current state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US Army in Afghanistan 370.
(photo credit:Reuters)

American-style counterinsurgency does not work. It has failed in Iraq and it is
currently failing in Afghanistan. In war, strategy should look to policy – which
gives war its direction – and then apply the tools of war, like military
tactics, to achieve policy aims in the most cost effective way in blood and
treasure.

Proof of counterinsurgency’s failures is the current state of
affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the United States spent 8.8
years nation-building, resulting in 4,773 Americans killed, thousands and
thousands more with life-changing wounds, not to mention the hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis killed, close to a million more Iraqis displaced from their
original homes with only a handful being able to return to them. Of course there
is the billions and billions of American funds spent as well. And from all of
that expenditure what appreciable strategic and policy gains has the US
achieved? Not much. The country is still mired in low grade war and one dictator
has been replaced with another – the latest one allied closely with America’s
strategic enemy in the region Iran.

In Afghanistan, and like Iraq, the US
has invested heavily since the beginning in a hefty nation-building
endeavor. Yet after 11 years of nation-building, the country is still in
tatters (if it ever wasn’t), its nascent political institutions are corrupt, the
Taliban enemy is still as strong as ever and, despite rosy proclamations by NATO
officials, objective reports show a steadily rising level of overall violence in
the country despite increased American troop numbers and a so-called new
counterinsurgency strategy.

Chinese war philosopher Sun Tzu wrote
thousands of years ago about the relationship between strategy and tactics in
war, that “strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory” but “tactics
without strategy is the noise before defeat.” His point was simple and clear: if
a state gets its strategy right then the tactics of war will fall into place.
But let a state gets its strategy wrong and no amount of tactical excellence can
save a war fought under a botched strategy.

History illuminates Sun Tzu’s
essential point. Think about the German army in World War II, probably one of
the finest industrialized tactical fighting armies the world had ever seen. Yet
all of that tactical excellence on the part of the German Army could not rescue
it from a dysfunctional strategic approach and a morally perverse policy under
Nazism. Conversely the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front in World War II
never amounted to much tactically, but had developed effective operational
commanders under a strategy that made sense for the Soviet Union.

IN
AFGHANISTAN today, American strategy has flunked Sun Tzu. America’s core policy
goal from the start of the war in 2001 up to the present—remembering that policy
gives war its overall direction and purpose—is focused on disrupting, disabling
and eventually defeating al-Qaida. It is actually a quite limited core policy
goal that makes infinite sense since it was al-Qaida that attacked America on
9/11. But in order to achieve that core policy objective, American strategy has
sought to use a maximalist operational method of counterinsurgency – armed
nation-building— to achieve it. It is like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail
through a soft piece of pine wood when a carpenter’s hammer would do the
trick.

The US has been doing armed nation-building from the very start,
investing huge amounts of blood and funds in Afghanistan to achieve its very
limited core policy goal, and it has not worked. This is why America has
failed at strategy in Afghanistan. There were always much more limited means to
apply to achieve the core policy goal, but the underlying assumption all along
was that nation-building was the method to achieve it.

This American
impulse to rebuild, to fix a foreign land after it has been broken by military
force seems to draw on a number of disparate causative forces in American
history.

There is the idea that emerges from the American Progressive Era
during the first years of the 20th century that human reason carried out by
experts empowered by governments can fix any problem that society confronts. For
example, back then Progressives thought that poverty could be tackled by experts
in social engineering and human behavior who could tweak attitudes among the
working classes.

There is also the idea that emerges after the American
experience in World War II that never again in the future could the US
supposedly “isolate” itself as it had in the 1930s from the rest of the world’s
problems – thus resulting in the rise of Nazism. Yet the US was never truly
isolated from the rest of the world during the years between World War I and
World War II. Still, this line of thinking has resonated forcefully over the
years because it assumes that American power, if applied correctly by smart
people throughout the world is limitless.

This leads to the last
causative factor in American history that has helped shape the current impulse
to “change an entire society” in Afghanistan. After World War II,
throughout the Cold War and persisting through the 9/11 era is the rock solid
assumption that whatever America does in the world is, by rule, morally
righteous. This hardened assumption of moral righteousness has combined
with another rock solid assumption: that American war of whatever kind works in
foreign lands, that if the United States just gets the tactics of war correct
and puts the right general in charge then anything can be accomplished with
military force.

It was a combination of these assumptions that drew the
United States into the quagmire of Vietnam, and it is these very same
assumptions and causative factors that have shaped America’s failed strategy in
Afghanistan.

The author is a serving American Army Colonel. In 2006 he
commanded a combat battalion in West Baghdad. He holds a PhD in history from
Stanford University.